The newly assertive Egyptian military and the civilian transitional government in Egypt are helping make President Obama’s life difficult. Likely it was Egypt that blocked the Arab League from calling for intervention against the Syrian regime despite its condemnation of Damascus for using chemical weapons.

Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy rejected a Western strike on Syria. He said that no country could attack another save in self-defense or in the case of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. The military-dominated government in Cairo despises political Islam and therefore doesn’t like the rebel forces. It now tilts toward the Arab Nationalist line of the Syrian Baath.

Leftist Egyptian politician Hamdeen Sabahi called on all Arabs to unite against a Western attack on Syria. He warned that if Syria were hit, Egypt would be next. This is paranoid stuff; the US has no intention of bombing Egypt!

Some Egyptian officials have criticized the US for not having a clear strategy for ‘the day after’.

Hosni Mubarak and Muhammad Morsi might have cooperated with the US on a strike. Those days are long past.

Just in time to celebrate Open Education Week, here comes a new initiative, the School of Open, a learning environment focused on increasing our understanding of “openness” and the benefits it brings to creativity and education in the digital age.

Just in time to celebrate Open Education Week, here comes a new initiative, the School of Open, a learning environment focused on increasing our understanding of “openness” and the benefits it brings to creativity and education in the digital age.

Developed by the collaborative education platform Peer to Peer University(P2PU) with organizational support from Creative Commons, the School of Open aims to spread understanding of the power of this brave new world through free online classes.

We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture—all good things, without a doubt—made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like.

But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?

School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what “openness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video.

These free courses start March 18 (sign up by clicking the “start course” button by Sunday, March 17):

Get a CC license. Put it on your websiteOpen Science: An IntroductionOpen data for GLAMsIntro to Openness in EducationA Look at Open VideoContributing to Wikimedia CommonsOpen Detective

The approach at P2PU encourages people to work together, assess one another’s work, and provide constructive feedback. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is broken down step-by-step, and course content is vetted by users and P2PU staff. The tutorial shows you how the process works.

This is a fascinating little interview with Timur Kuran, an expert in Islamic finance. The point being made is that Islamic styles of finance aren’t, in fact, all that different from the “western” type that we are used to. And in fact, in certain situations, being “more Islamic” would actually be beneficial, work better than those traditional western systems.

The heart of the comments about the banking system are here:Whether the Qur’an bans all forms of interest, or specifically its exploitative forms, was a matter of controversy in the early decades of Islam. It still remains in doubt. What is crystal clear is that what passes as Islamic finance is anything but interest-free. Almost all of the Islamic banks in existence, including those in Egypt, charge their borrowers what any economist would call interest; they also pay their depositors interest as a matter of course. This is not surprising, for interest continues to provide tangible benefits to both lenders and depositors.

In economic terms, while the banks don’t charge or pay what they call interest, the effects are that they do indeed charge and pay interest. Those of us who have dealt with such banks, in however minor a way in my own case, know this to be true. The really interesting, to me at least, point made is the following:

"Having suggested that in its present form Islamic banking would not solve any of Egypt’s pressing economic problems, let me acknowledge that Islamic banks might bring benefits by abiding by their stated mode of operation. The charters of Islamic banks instruct them to lend on the basis of “profit and loss sharing” rather than for a fixed return. They are to operate like the venture capital companies that have financed the global high-tech industry. Venture capital firms lend to promising entrepreneurs, for a share of any profits, without regard to collateral, track record, or connections. They take genuine risks, losing money when investments that they finance fail".

With its young population and high unemployment, Egypt desperately needs more venture capital. That is why genuine Islamic finance could bring major benefits to Egypt.

That is, it would be a good idea if these banks, or some of them, stopped copying the western model and actually moved over to the VC model they’re supposed to be based upon. (...)

Just as reading relies on neural mechanisms that pre-date the emergence of writing [17], so perhaps language has evolved to rely on pre-existing brain systems. However, there is more agreement about the origin of linguistic ...

(Abstract) In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the noun-verb distinction (e.g., Straits Salish), whereas others have a proliferation of fine-grained syntactic categories (e.g., Tzeltal); and some languages do without morphology (e.g., Mandarin), while others pack a whole sentence into a single word (e.g., Cayuga). A challenge for evolutionary biology is to reconcile the diversity of languages with the high degree of biological uniformity of their speakers. Here, we model processes of language change and geographical dispersion and find a consistent pressure for flexible learning, irrespective of the language being spoken. This pressure arises because flexible learners can best cope with the observed high rates of linguistic change associated with divergent cultural evolution following human migration. Thus, rather than genetic adaptations for specific aspects of language, such as recursion, the coevolution of genes and fast-changing linguistic structure provides the biological basis for linguistic diversity. Only biological adaptations for flexible learning combined with cultural evolution can explain how each child has the potential to learn any human language.

The Egyptian minister of antiquities announces that a team of German archaeologists has discovered missing pieces belonging to the famed Colossi of Memnon. The statues, dating to roughly 1350 BC, were damaged in an earthquake during the Roman era.

The colossi are some of Egypt's oldest touristic attractions, drawing tourists since ancient times. The twin statues, over 18 meters (60 feet) tall each, are of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who was worshipped as a deity. The statues are the only remains of a large temple that was built in memorial of the pharaoh.

Minister of Antiquities Mohammed Ibrahim says Sunday the team made the discovery in cooperation with archaeologists from Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities. He said the pieces belong to the belt of one statue, and the base of the other.

Secretary of State John Kerry opened his speech Friday by describing the horrors victims of the chemical weapon attack had suffered, including twitching, spasms and difficulty breathing. Attempting to drive the point home, Kerry referenced a photograph used by the BBC, illustrating a child jumping over hundreds of dead bodies covered in white shrouds. The Secretary of State forgot to mention, however, that this photo was taken during US intervention in Iraq back in 2003.

The photo which was later retracted was meant to depict victims who allegedly succumbed to the effects of chemical weapons launched by Assad’s regime.

It's essential for all miners to enforce exactly the same rules about what counts as a valid block. If a client announces a block that half the network accepts and the other half rejects, the result could be a fork in the network. Different nodes could disagree about which transactions have occurred, potentially producing chaos.

That's what happened on Monday evening. A block was produced that the latest version of the Bitcoin software, version 0.8, recognized as valid but that nodes still running version 0.7 or earlier rejected.

The outcome of the Italian elections should send a clear message to Europe’s leaders: the austerity policies that they have pursued are being rejected by voters. The European project, as idealistic as it was, was always a top-down endeavor.

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